December 10, 2012 — In addition to this week's NewsBreak(s), the editors have compiled the Weekly News Digest, featuring stories from the week just past that you should know about. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.

The IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters announced a preview of its newest intelligence solution, Thomson Reuters Cortellis for Clinical Trials Intelligence. Scheduled for release in early 2013, this capability will provide drug development and clinical professionals with the critical information necessary to evaluate market opportunities, identify potential barriers, and establish informed decisions about clinical trial design and operations.

Cortellis for Clinical Trials Intelligence is the latest information solution offered through Thomson Reuters Cortellis, the company’s Life Sciences information delivery platform. It has the broadest remit of any clinical trials database including a 45-year history of clinical outcomes, as well as the latest market competitive activity from established and emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil. It is the only solution that enables a customer to integrate their proprietary research data with comprehensive clinical trials protocols and outcomes, drug pipeline, biomarker, regulatory, financial, and patent information from Thomson Reuters. With its integrated analytics tools and visualizations, users will have greater opportunities to maximize the value of clinical trial content to inform internal strategy and decision-making.

“Cortellis for Clinical Trials Intelligence provides comprehensive clinical trial protocols and outcomes with global reach and integrates with other key intelligence areas—such as patents and literature—to allow for the broadest possible perspectives and actionable insights,” said Jon Brett-Harris, executive vice president at Thomson Reuters. “However, it is not just an information web portal. We are also providing multiple delivery options, such as dynamic real-time visualizations, iPad support and application programming interfaces to assist our customers in integrating it with their existing knowledge platforms and workflow solutions.”

Source: Thomson Reuters

PubReader: A New Way to Read Articles in PubMed Central

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) developed a new presentation style called PubReader, an easier way to use your web browser to read articles in PubMed Central on your desktop, laptop, or tablet computer. Like a printed paper, PubReader breaks an article into multiple columns and pages to improve readability and navigation. PubReader can expand a page to whatever fits on your screen, with multiple columns on a desktop monitor or a single column page on a small tablet. It will even switch to two columns if you rotate the tablet to a landscape view. When you adjust the font size or change the size of the browser window, page boundaries and columns are adjusted automatically.

The PubReader presentation offers a variety of common options for moving between pages:

Use the PageUp, PageDown, RightArrow, LeftArrow keys on a keyboard

Tap or click in the right or left margin to turn a page

Use finger swipes on a touch device

Use a progress bar at the bottom of the screen to jump across the page range

There is an image strip at the bottom of the page with thumbnails of all figures and tables in the article so that you can pop up an earlier figure/table and then close it in an instant without losing your place in the article. This same feature works with inline figures, tables, and citations as well. PubReader has a number of other features to improve your reading experience, which you will discover as you use it in PMC. You can read more about the PubReader view at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/pubreader/ or you can try it directly by clicking on the new PubReader link for an article in a PMC search result list. The PubReader presentation only works in relatively recent versions of web browsers. See the list of supported browsers.

Here are the technical details. The PubReader view is implemented in the same way as the traditional PMC article display, only using features and functions that are available in the latest versions of the underlying technologies, HTML5 and CSS3. To create the PubReader display, we start with the XML version of an article and use XSLT to convert it to an HTML document. Then we add in CSS and JavaScript to implement the formatting, paging, navigation, and text reflowing. The entire article is loaded into a web browser as a single HTML page. The browser handles paging and other functions locally, giving the flexibility described above without sacrificing efficiency and speed.

The CSS and Javascript code used to create the PubReader display is available from the NCBI repository on GitHub. Anyone can use or adapt this code to display journal articles or other content that is structured as an HTML5 document.

Source: NCBI

ProQuest Expands DNSA With Newly Declassified U.S./Argentina Files

ProQuestexpanded its Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) with newly declassified files that chronicle the development of U.S. policy as it attempted to deal with the tragedy experienced in Argentina during the critical, formative period of the late 1970s. This was a time that featured a political collapse verging on civil war, a military coup, and massive illegal detentions, torture and kidnappings. The records, described by the National Security Archive as “extraordinary,” are currently being used as evidence in dozens of human rights trials against former military officials in Argentina, making access to them particularly timely.

Published by ProQuest in collaboration with the National Security Archive, DNSA provides online access to the most significant declassified primary documents in key areas of U.S. foreign and military policy since 1945. DNSA is created by the National Security Archive, with each set carefully curated by an expert in the field. Each collection is years in the making.

Argentina, 1975-1980: The Making of U.S. Human Rights Policy, the 39th DNSA collection, reveals U.S. officials grappling with human rights violations on a scale never heard of in the Western Hemisphere, punctuated by the disappearance of tens of thousands of people at the hands of Argentine security forces. The declassified records in this set—most of them acquired through original research by National Security Archive project staff and never before published—have been carefully selected to tell the story. The collection opens with the clamoring of the Argentine establishment in early 1976 for an end to chaos, anarchy, and political violence, which culminated in support for the military coup d’état. By the second half of that year, U.S. officials were noting the disappearance of thousands of people, and in 1977, the Carter administration began to implement an innovative and vocal human rights policy to stop the military violence. The collection wraps up during the early years of the Reagan administration, with U.S. officials such as Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams pressing Argentine generals to address the wrenching problem of “children taken from their families during the dirty war” by security forces.

Source: ProQuest

LexisNexis Launches Risk-Monitoring Tool for Supply Management

LexisNexisLegal & Professional announced the launch of LexisNexis SmartWatch, a risk-monitoring tool for supply management professionals. Drawing upon the vast LexisNexis collection of global news content and proprietary risk event tagging, LexisNexis SmartWatch algorithms score and surface concerns about an organization’s suppliers and supply management partners, based upon each enterprise’s particular risk profile. LexisNexis SmartWatch—for which a patent is pending—then uses unique information visualization techniques, which enable supply management and procurement professionals to efficiently monitor thousands of suppliers for disruptive events that might affect their supply chain.

Hundreds of risk events are pre-defined, scored, and categorized into the six “PESTLE” categories used by supply management professionals to understand and manage supplier-specific and macro challenges associated with global sourcing: Political, Economic, Societal, Technical, Legal, and Environmental. The product assesses not only the supplier company but also its location and its industry, against the risk categories, providing the most comprehensive and actionable insights. Examples of unpredictable events include bankruptcies and early warnings of financial difficulties, such as layoffs, re-statements of earnings, executive moves, and more. Other such events include strikes, natural disasters, commodity shortages, product recalls, new regulations, cyber theft, counterfeit goods, and other situations.

The LexisNexis SmartWatch user simply clicks on a color-coded cell to view the news events that have generated the risk score for quick, actionable insight. Only risky events are surfaced, ensuring highly relevant results to help companies and organizations discover and prepare for various types of business disruptions across thousands of suppliers.

LexisNexis SmartWatch results are gathered from more than 26,000 authoritative, global news sources, including local, regional, and international news publications, industry and trade journals, legal and regulatory analyses, business and financial editorial, and more.

LexisNexis SmartWatch was developed in close cooperation with the procurement organization of Reed Elsevier, parent company of LexisNexis, along with supply chain management professionals from other companies, representing many industry sectors. Prototypes were tested and feedback was provided throughout the development process.

Source: LexisNexis Legal & Professional

Science.gov Celebrates 10 Years of Service

The federal government’s “one-stop” real-time science data website, Science.gov is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Science.gov was launched in December 2002 and has broken new ground in interagency collaboration. Senior information managers representing 13 federal agencies forged a consensus on how national science organizations could improve public access to the nation’s rich and diverse scientific research information and partnered to create the Science.gov web portal.

“Over the past 10 years Science.gov has grown in content, capability, features and functionality,” said Tina Gheen of the Library of Congress and chair of the Science.gov Alliance. “As a result, we have seen significant user growth. We are very proud of this offering of sound science to the public, and we hope to continue providing this free service for years to come.”

There are now more than 200 million pages in Science.gov, and the annual page views top 34 million, a 45-fold increase from the earliest days. The founding idea was to provide a comprehensive gateway to federal science information for those who might not know exactly where to find it. The interagency effort would raise scientific and technical literacy, serve as a foundation for future discoveries, and foster greater understanding of the public’s return on investment from the government’s science and technology efforts.

“From its inception, Science.gov has been a model of collaboration, transparency, and open government,” said Alliance co-chair Annie Simpson of the U.S. Geological Survey. “Back in 2002, Science.gov was touted as a wonderful ‘potluck picnic’ of science agencies pooling their efforts so citizens could find the science information they need. Well, today we are still pooling our resources because the sum is more useful to the American public than what any individual agency can do.”

The technology has changed and improved, but the goals remain the same; Science.gov strives to grow and evolve to serve users even better. In addition to recent enhancements, in June, Science.gov Mobile made it onto two Top-10 federal government applications lists. A Spanish version of the website was launched in October along with video and image search and other improvements.

The Science.gov website is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), within the Office of Science. For interesting facts from the Science.gov Alliance members, see www.science.gov/coolstuff.

Source: Science.gov

UniPHY Scientific Social Network to Close at Year End

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced the closure of its UniPHY scientific social network service; the website will be taken down on Dec. 31, 2012. According to the statement from AIP, “While we were one of the first to enter the social networking space by launching UniPHY in 2009, rapid change and advances in this area have led to the emergence of competing services, such as Mendeley, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and others. Moving forward, we will use the insights gained over the past three years to develop new and innovative products and services that will help scientists connect, collaborate, and innovate.”

Users may wish to review their profiles and other content that they have posted or uploaded to www.aipuniphy.org before Dec. 31. You retain ownership of your content (as defined in the site’s privacy policy and terms of use). AIP reports that it will continue to honor your UniPHY personal and membership information confidentiality under the UniPHY Privacy Policy.